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>> Saturday, November 2, 2013

Original artwork. Dana Hanna (producer) shares her memories of 'The Crow' with Alan: ''Philips bought the game rights and had it in development with Philips POV, the studio that did Voyeur. It was in their production queue for a while, but as I remember, they were busy finishing up Voyeur 2, and it languished a bit. Philips senior management started thinking about having another group work on it.''

Dana Hanna remembers... ''My lead artist, Rantz, was a comic book artist, and he knew The Crow well. I was also a big fan - my comic book collection was nothing to sneeze at''.

Dana Hanna reflects on her time at Philips.. ''I had recently returned from the UK where I had been helping out on 7th Guest and Burn:Cycle. The Philips studio in Surrey had been closed after 7th Guest shipped. I gathered a small internal production team in the LA offices, unofficially named Black Mariah, mainly to do localizations and ports of those two games. We were also trying to finish up work on Microcosm, which had been produced in the Surrey studio - but that's another story. We wanted an original game to work on together.

The group decided to throw our collective hat in the ring for The Crow project. We worked our butts off putting together a pitch book. I think it got done in about a month. Senior Management at Philips saw that we had a lot of passion for the project and gave us a shot.

I had some good talent lined up. The game, true to the style of the time, was going to have a lot of live action footage and CG environments. We got an amazing team lined up and agreeing to work on a tiny budget. Gustavo Garzon was going to direct - he's gone on to win Grammy awards for his music videos. We had Dave Ehlers, Daniele Colajacomo and his team creating the 3D environments. We met with Edward Pressman (Pressman Films) and he liked the pitch. It was pretty exciting for our young team.

Anyway, a few days after we signed a contract with Daniele, new management at Philips killed the game. I'm not sure if the guy who killed it even saw the pitch - he never met with the team. A few games I've worked on since have been cancelled, but this one hurt the most. We had a tremendous love for the project and for the license. It was more than just business for us.

Philips was happy to let us try to shop the idea to other publishers, but nothing came together. I moved on to Virgin Interactive a few months after the project ended.

I have such fond memories of my time at Philips... many of us still keep in touch. We used to call it 'Philips University', since it was a first games job for many of us who went on to have good careers in the industry. 'The Crow' team is still one of my favorites in all my years in the business.

''When we were shopping the game to other publishers, we did up one-of-a-kind binders with original art for the documentation. I kept one.''. I'm SO glad you did, Dana :-)

The 'Skull Cowboy' character - looks quite menacing!

Tin Tin character.

Sarah character - looks quite cool doesn't she?

Very interesting to see how the interactive content and non-interactive would have played. From this, I would say that the game may have been similar in gameplay terms to Cyber Soldier Sharaku.

The artwork looks fantastic.

Action shots - looks like the showdown!Thanks to Alan from Philips CD-i Zone for this!

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